NO TATTOO, SO U.S. ARMY LET MENGELE GO

The U.S. Army detained Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele after World War II but released him months later because he could not be identified properly, according to notes and letters Mengele sent to his son.

The "Angel of Death" who was responsible for the killing of 400,000 Jews at the Auschwitz concentration camp avoided detection while he was detained because, for reasons of vanity, he had refused to tattoo his blood type in his armpit as all SS officers were required to do.

Allied investigators seeking SS personnel looked for the tattoo as a telltale mark in identifying high-ranking Nazi soldiers suspected of war crimes who might be put on trial.

When U.S. soldiers found no tattoo on Mengele and could not find any wrongdoing committed by a Fritz Hollmann -- the alias that Mengele was using at the time -- he was discharged from the internment camp.

The revelations appeared in this week's edition of Bunte magazine, a Munich weekly that acquired from Mengele's son Rolf more than 30 pounds of notes, letters and photographs about Mengele's life on the run. Four historians have confirmed that it is authentic.